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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy. That zero mission rhythm isn't intended to sound smooth and soft, the driving hard beats are an emotional tool for eliciting anxiety and anticipation from the player.

But this is a bit like those who use smoothing filters. It's ultimately about taste, but it should be recognized that unless the filter is attempting to accurately recreate the original hardware of the era then the original design intent is not being adhered to, and so something may be lost in the "enhancement".

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> The originals sound better. The aliasing provides a crunchiness and sharpness to the final output that drives emotional energy.

In the mid-1980s the first really affordable sampler was the Ensoniq Mirage, which used the Bob Yannes-designed ES5503 DOC (Digital Oscillator Chip) to generate its waveforms. It played back 8-bit samples and used a fairly simple phase accumulator that didn't do any form of interpolation (I don't count "leftmost neighbour" as interpolation). Particularly when you pitch it down, you get a rough, clanky, gritty "whine" to samples, that the analogue filters didn't necessarily do a lot to remove.

Later on they released the EPS which had 13-bit sampling. Why 13-bit? I don't know, I guess because the Emulator I and II used 8-bit samples but μ-law coding, giving effectively 13-bit equivalent resolution. It also used linear interpolation to smooth the "jumps" between samples, and even if you loaded in and converted a Mirage disk the "graininess" when you pitched things down was gone.

I'm currently writing some code to play back Mirage samples from disk images, and I've actually added a linear interpolator to it. Some things sound better with it, some things sound worse. I think I'll make it a front panel control, so you can turn it on and off as you want.

I'll just throw some more ES5503 DOC love here. It's also the audio chip in the Apple IIGS. In 1986, having a stock home computer playing 32 simultaneous hardware voices (without software mixing), each with hardware pan ... was remarkable. Otherwise you were stuck with 3 or maybe 4 hardware voices. e.g. the timbre and filter of the C64 SID chip was gorgeous (another Bob Yannes design), but 3 voices was all you got. And just 3 square waves and noise on the Ataris of the era. Chords or complex harmony? Fire up the arpeggiators! Lol.

When I browse the demoscene I'm always a bit surprised there's not much Apple IIGS content. Graphically, it was stunted, but the ES5503 DOC was a pro synth engine right there next to the 6502 ... yowza.

A friend had this killer basement setup with a projector into a huge canvas dropsheet. Plus the game cube, and the GBA dock for it, so we were projecting those games meant for a 2 inch screen maybe 10-15 feet wide.

Imagining how sharp and crisp those pixels must have been at that size... Oh man.

If it wasn't so late I'd calculate how big (in inches) an individual pixel is at that size.

0.5" at 10' wide screen (assuming no letter-boxing). GBA screen is 240x160 pixels.

It's really close for me. I listened to the accurate version, then the enhanced one, and my first thought was "oh, yeah, this sounds better."

Then I listened to the accurate version again, and thought "wait, never mind, this one sounds better."

After going back and forth a few times, I think I still agree the original/accurate one is better, but it's pretty close. I really encourage people to listen for themselves.

For what it's worth, I have little to no personal nostalgia for the Game Boy Advance.

This is fair, I should have made it clearer that this is all subjective. For what it's worth I have all of this disabled by default in my own emulator because I think default settings should always err towards accuracy when that's a question.

I personally do prefer the interpolated versions in most cases because to me the extra high-frequency information just sounds like noise that makes it harder for my brain to process the underlying music. But clearly many feel differently!

I think it's not so much that one sounds better or the other.

The "uninterpolated" one is incorrect.

The "interpolated" one is incorrect.

The uninterpolated one has sharp square edges, which isn't correct. The GBA has a 12dB/octave filter at around 12kHz (IIRC) on the output, which the uninterpolated simulated output doesn't appear to have. This would knock the corners off a bit and make it "smoother" and less hissy, but would still have quite crunchy low frequency sounds.

The interpolated one smooths things off excessively, and while it doesn't really have much less spectral energy high up, what's there is in the wrong place.

Well, we can't just say 'original = intent'. The original artists presumably did the best job of expressing their intent as far as possible in the medium at the time, but that doesn't mean that this necessarily is the best expression of their intent ever.

It's like saying you can only watch the Simpsons with the exact late 1980s / early 1990s ads that they originally aired with, and everything else is sacrilege.

But without asking them it's pure conjecture. I don't think trying to retcon the best expression of their intent needs to be used to justify this project, either. Sometimes it's fun to see if you can build an improvement on what exists, even if it's a vehicle for learning about DSP or whatever domain the learner is in.

The originals sound better.

I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.

that drives emotional energy

Seems like a hyperbolic rationalization.

The ‘improved’ versions sound muffled like I have water in my ears. Plus I’d rather hear the game as it was designed, artefacts and all.

The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint. We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.

> The artifacts weren't a conscious design decision, they were a constraint.

Of course the artifacts were a constraint. Whether consciously considered or not, constraints influence design decisions.

> We don't know whether the designers would have chosen to keep them or not, if they had the choice.

Maybe Frédéric Chopin would have written his etudes and nocturnes for the Roland SC-55 Goblins instrument patch if that choice had been available to him, but it wasn't. What we do know of are the choices he actually made facing the constraints that he actually faced.

Similarly, maybe a GBA music composer would have preferred for the music to be a high fidelity recording of a full piano arrangement if that choice had been available to them. But it wasn't, so they didn't.

We can speculate all we want about what creative choices might have been made if the people behind them were dealt a different hand, but in reality choices don't exist in isolation of constraints, and I think any line of reasoning trying to divorce the two is futile.

GBA games were made for a console that behaved like this.

Accuracy is paramount. Targeting else than the console's sound is an affront to preservation.

Preservation and design intent are two very different things.

The idea that sound designers on old games were totally siloed and ignorant of how their compositions would sound on final consumer hardware is completely wrong. Most of these composers were programmers themselves and knew exactly how to get the final hardware to make the sounds they wanted, even when they composed using more advanced tech.

Programmers using devkits (more powerful than the consumer hardware) likewise.

I don't understand what you mean. Nobody said they didn't know how their compositions would sound, my argument is that at least some of these composers would have chosen the more advanced interpolation method, if it were available.

I guess it's hard to stop my originalist tendencies from boiling over into other topics...

What you're saying to me is like someone saying, well, if the piano had more octaves then existing compositions would have been better. But those pieces were composed with the current amount of octaves in mind in the first place...

Maybe there's an analogue with the harpsichord-to-piano transition, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about that yet.

Haha, my first gut reaction to reading your second paragraph was "No, it'd be better to compare it to compositions written for harpsichord and played on piano".

I guess history has shown that most composers (and listeners) preferred the piano sound over the harpsichord sound the majority of the time.

That may be true, but the sound designers were still making the best of what they had. They could probably imagine how the same composition would sound better.

When you play e.g. Gamecube games in an emulator, do you run them in 480p or do you render at a higher resolution? The former is clearly what the designers were targeting, but I think there’s rarely any benefit to eschewing higher resolutions. It just looks even better.

sure, and you know what their design intent was right?

You say that, but it was quite common to "allow" a bit of aliasing in sampling back when we had very limited equipment, to introduce a bit of "sparkle" into percussive sounds that would otherwise be lost by low sampling rates.

Given its spectral complexity can you even tell if a hihat sample is aliased?

>I don't think so, I think you're just getting a high end that isn't in the original audio. In the places where there are high frequencies the aliasing and the hiss just gets in the way.

I don't get this, are you saying that this aliasing is just an artifact of the emulation? Like the GBA speaker/headphone jack itself would also be affected by the same aliasing right? And in that case the song was composed for that, right?

I don't think it would be right to go as far as to say that there's a huge strong interplay in every single GBA title's song with the hardware (I'm sure some stuff was phoned in and only listened to by the composer in whatever MIDI DAW thing they were using) but at one point the GBA was the target right?

Yeah this is a neat experiment, but the ‘cleaned up’ versions sound ‘wrong’ to my ears - that high whistle/hiss is ‘missing.’

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